I have never been able to determine how these search results are ordered. Typically, search results are returned in order of relevance and the search help says they are "weighted heavily towards question title matches", but in this case, you would think that the search would order them based on whatever tab is currently selected (newest, hot, active)?

I ordinarily never stray outside of 'newest', but it's clear the results are not sorted by age.

Hmm.. I used to be puzzled by the search result sort order as well. but the last time i checked, 'newest' tab seem to make sense to me. Any specific keyword search gave u the problem?
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o.k.wJan 9 '10 at 4:19

1 Answer
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They are not ordered - at least not in a way humans would expect ;). If you search for relevance and do not provide any search text which with a relevance ordering can be computed, then I guess the results are listed in that order the SQL query returns them from the database - first found, first out. It depends how the content is stored in the database tables. So it looks arbitrary but it is no random order. random is messing things up anyway